Seventh Street
Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,Bootleggers in silken shirts,Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.
Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,Bootleggers in silken shirts,Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.
Words in this poem
- ballooned a.
- Swelled out like a balloon.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Seventh Street is in the public domain. This text is taken from Cane, Project Gutenberg ebook #60093; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Jean Toomer, Seventh Street, in Cane (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #60093, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/toomer-cane/seventh-street.html, id L01571.
Form and metre
Seventh Street is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. Every stanza rhymes AABB. The metre is trochaic pentameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 87%). 86% of its stressed syllables fall where the metre puts the beat. The lines average 8.0 syllables.
See other poems in trochaic pentameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 AABB hurtsA · shirtsA · cadillacsB · tracksB
- 2 AABB hurtsA · shirtsA · cadillacsB · tracksB
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against trochaic pentameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts, | 9 | /˘··/˘/˘· |
| Bootleggers in silken shirts, | 7 | /·˘·/˘· |
| Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, | 7 | ˘//˘/˘· |
| Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. | 9 | /˘/˘····· |
| Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts, | 9 | /˘··/˘/˘· |
| Bootleggers in silken shirts, | 7 | /·˘·/˘· |
| Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, | 7 | ˘//˘/˘· |
| Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. | 9 | /˘/˘····· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.